Re: The World Atlas of Language Structures

I'd say the voiced stops have changed to such an extent that they have now
become approximants/fricatives and the plosive forms are now the allophones.
Particularly in Castilian.
Correct me if I'm wrong, since I'm no Spanish speaker, but I thought
nowadays the stops occur only in clusters? I think what the site meant would
be that the voicing contrast in stops has evolved into a litany of other
sounds and that the "best", or easiest, or whatever, way to classify them
would be to throw them into a "fricative" category. Perhaps.

Eugene

On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 11:40 AM, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:

> Which is *almost* exactly backwards... Lessee. p/b, t/d, k/g; f but no
> v, s but no z, tS but no dZ in most dialects: /Z/ but no /S/ in some.
> Some dialects do have T vs D (the latter as an allophone of /d/), and
> most have x vs G (/g/)
>
>
>
> On 4/25/08, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...> wrote:
> > On Apr 25, 2008, at 9:52 PM, Paul Bennett wrote:
> >
> > > The World Atlas of Language Structures is now available for free
> > > online, in a nifty Google Maps powered form.
> > >
> > > http://www.wals.info/
> > >
> > > I cannot succinctly explain it, except to place it at least on the
> > > same level as STARLING, IEIOL, indo-european.nl, and the Rosetta
> > > Project on my list of awesome linguistics resources.
> >
> > Indeed it is cool! But it says that Spanish shows voicing contrast in
> > fricatives and not plosives :/
> >
>
> --
> Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com
>
> Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
>

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